Preface by

Alice Vieira

The gentleman that used to tell stories.

A long, long time ago, I was about your age.

«Were there still dinosaurs?», asked me some days ago  my little grandson.

No, really there weren’t dinosaurs yet.

But there wasn’t television either, neither computer, nor mobile phone, nor iPod, nor MP3, nor Playstation, nor a row of other wonders, essential in our present life.

But the fact that they didn’t exist didn’t avoid that – in the course of a difficult childhood, lonely and with little love – I was a happy child.

And that felicity I owe it to the books that I read and, specially, to the books of a gentleman named Adolfo Simões Muller.

Adolfo Simões Muller was acquainted with a great deal of stories and spent all his life telling stories.

His books had plenty of heroes, of artists, of explorers, of adventurers, and he related his stories as if they lived right here at our side, as if, suddenly, they got our home in, as if they were our friends, with whom we could spend all the afternoon chatting.

The characters of his books were the authentic friends that I had in my childhood.

Always very ill, I dreamed with the night when Florence Nightingale (english nurse, famous by her deeds in the Crimean war, in XIX century, and character of «The Lamp that Never Fades») neared my bed, put the hand on my forehead and sent the fever far away.

And when the colds arrived, I always recalled the scene when Madame Curie (scientist, that discovered the radioactivity, Nobel Prize by two occasions, and character of «The Magic Stone and the Little Sick Princess»), student almost in misery, when turning in, she put the chair above the bed to create the illusion of more warm.

With the books of Adolfo Simões Muller, I learned that our life was what we could attain of it.

With the «Prince of the Sea» (that you have now in your hands), I learned the pride of the people to whom I belong – that was in adventure in unknown seas, steering for unknown lands, listening the voices of the time to guarantee that the horizon line was the end of the world, and that after the end of the world there were only dragons. But Henry the Navigator knew that nothing was true, that there were plenty of lands after that line that our sight reached, and to discover them was the dream and the work of all his life.

And the achievement of that dream was so important that, with so many infants (of our kings) that our history had, still today when we say «The Infant» - is always to him that we refer.

The books of Adolfo Simões Muller crossed generations. My sons read them to the sons they had afterwards. It’s also possible that your fathers and your grandfathers had likewise read them.

Now it’s your turn.

And I only beg you that, after reading (and rereading...) this «Prince of the Sea», you shield it with much care in your bookcase.

With the purpose that one day it will arrive in good conditions to the hands of your sons, and from them to the hands of your grandsons.

That’s much possible that they will regard you and ask:

- In your age were there dinosaurs yet?

The book of your further reading

In Sagres, in Ceuta, in Brasil, on the waters of sea, it always came to my mind the image of Henry the infant, true wizard of modern world who knew, with his magic words «Further on!» and the complete fulfilment of his emblem «Talent de bien faire», to give to the map of the world its true shape and its perfect configuration.

In the history of geographic knowledge of the world we can in fact to say, with entire justice, «before Henry the Navigator» and «after Henry the Navigator», or – as already told an English writer and it’s the same – an epoch «before Vasco da Gama» and other epoch «after Vasco da Gama». Gama, Cabral, Magalhães, Bartolomeu Dias, what are these navigators, all of them, after all, if not other wonderful incarnation of the dream that guided Henry the Navigator?

Got divided the men, in the study of the intentions that animated Henry the Navigator in the deed of discovery of new lands. Some want that Henry was impelled only by a mercantile sense, the anxiety of riches: the gold, the spice, the gemstone of new lands, mainly of Orient, could come to Portugal. Others, on the contrary, see in him the Crusade of XV century, wishing to vibrate in the Islam a terrible blow with the finality of conquer the Holy Land. So there are those who think that were both the reasons at the same time the true foundations of the School of Sagres of Henry the Navigator, where was ordered the true purpose of the voyage to India, making the circuit of African continent.

 131824For us, author and readers of this book, it must interest, more than these hypothesis, or thesis, the true certainty of extraordinary value of the deed of the infant, without whom the world could very well be late one century in relation to present civilization, and Portugal  perhaps would disappear of the map, lose his independence, so gloriously firmed forever through expansion of our maritime frontiers.

What I wished, above all, is that my young readers had well in mind, on reading this little book, that all that is written happened five centuries ago, in a world settled of legends and of fears and having the learned men means really diminished when compared to the existing means. It wasn’t only to go as far as the islands of Azores or as far as Cap-Vert peninsula on a walnut shell boat, so to speak at the mercy of the winds. The worst of that: it was to go, in those conditions, as far as the unknown. And, obviously, to return, without whom the enterprise, besides all that, would result vain. In reference to his projects, the infant’s men were in a much more difficult situation than that of the scientists of our days before the spacial voyages.

It’s in this light that must be seen the maritime discoveries, made in the shield of Henry the Navigator. And we remember that, if there were till today big services to the humanity, it wasn’t really little service this of reveal the world to the Man.

There is a valuable and immense bibliography of Henry. Hundreds, if not thousands of scientists, of all times and of all countries, have studied the man and the deed of Henry the Navigator. If the books speaking of him aren’t a large quantity as the ones having other subjects as Napoleon or Wagner, they however do a long collection to study to whom would be, no doubt, necessary a lot of years of reading.

Between the writings I consulted to write this book – and they were more than thirty – I want to point out the notable studies of Richard Henry Major, Raymond Beazley, Edgar Prestage, between the foreigners, and the books of Oliveira Martins, Joaquim Bensaúde, Gago Coutinho, Fontoura da Costa, Quirino da Fonseca, Jaime Cortesão, Damião Peres, Vitorino Nemésio, Costa Brochado, and so on.

But the main source of consultation was, as inevitable, the lively reporting of the discoveries and of the main deeds of the life of Henry, published in that newspaper of long ago that had the name of Chronicles. Finally, all that it’s important, fundamental, about the subject, it is in the golden pages of our chroniclers. And, so, I don’t want to forget saying, thinking aloud, how interesting would be (in my thinking, evidently) an issue of Chronicles, of Gomes Eanes de Zurara for instance, reduced to the essential, despoiled of some considerations more or less philosophical, and set in Portuguese language of today: lacking the preoccupation of the archaisms and of unabridged texts that, those, are indispensable yes, but for whom have already advanced knowledge. I myself, I confess that I don’t know a better service we could do to our chroniclers and to their wonderful work, than to put it at the reach of all.

I want, at last, to remember that the rank of «Prince» is given, for the first time in Portugal, to the heir of our king Duarte. So, Henry wasn’t prince, but infant. Simply, I thought nicer to say «The Prince of the Sea». And that doesn’t come bad to the world, so much more than that, did this warning, no reader will incur, by my fault, in error in the classroom.

So that’s that! My little book, my boat of paper, here he goes on an adventure, threw to the tenebrous sea of the printed letter. That it had the glorious destiny of to discover in one of my readers, the pleasure of the study of Henry the Navigator’s life «The Prince of the Sea»

Adolfo Simões Muller